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Address: I work from home in beautiful Shipham, Somerset, England Where to send the fan mail: steve@cyberlife-research.com Job: Digital god Interests: complex systems, applications of biological ideas to computer science, artificial life, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, aviation (except I had to give up flying because of pressure of work), flight simulators (on account of the aforementioned lack of any real flying), biology, geology, archaeology, local Dark Age history, photography, electronics, making the world a better place… BackgroundI began programming in 1977, starting as I meant to go on by crashing the Physics Department's PDP8. I then generously splashed out my girlfriend's life savings on a single board computer called a Nascom1, and taught myself machine code. The first program I wrote was a learning Draughts (Checkers) program, which fitted into 768 bytes (couldn't do that now - they don't seem to make memory like they used to). I was training as a teacher at the time, but quickly realised that although I was fascinated by the way children's minds grow, I was totally useless at standing up in front of them to speak without becoming a nervous wreck. I left college too late to get a grant, so never graduated and my life's gone downhill ever since. A dead-end job made it easy for me to agree to become the housewife and mother when our son was born. Six years of that gave me time to experiment with neural networks, evolving organisms and evolved finite state automata (as well as teaching me that men aren't built to be mothers). This was all completely ignorant experimentation, since apart from a brief mention of Perceptrons I'd never heard of anybody trying to simulate brains or evolution on computers - they don't stock books like that in the "Parenting" section. I did manage to develop a small population of evolving, neural net-driven animats, and had a lot of fun evolving plant morphology, none of which was of any practical benefit to me until the time I started writing Creatures. At that point life started perking up and showing an interest. My first big claim to fame was that I was the architect and lead programmer for Creatures, where I did what I could to bring a new form of life into existence. Since I'm their creator, you'd have thought they would repay me with a little respect, but oh no. Do they ever do as I tell them? Do they heck! Adam and Eve all over again… Creatures was written while at Millennium Interactive, but since it looked like being a hot property, we set up Cyberlife Technology Ltd, later called Creature Labs Ltd. and Millennium was sold to Sony. I was a co-founder of CTL and was its Technical Director for four years until we decided to go our separate ways and I left to set up Cyberlife Research Ltd. (Note: CRL is and was completely independent of the recently defunct Creature Labs). If you're a Creatures fan, you might be interested in my archive of design documents, dating from the C1 days. I recently wrote a book about my ideas on life the universe and everything (but especially intelligence), which was published in 2000 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and shortlisted for the Aventis Prize in 2001 (it didn't win, but maybe next time). I've recently completed a second book about the development of my first robot life form - Lucy, to whom much of this website is devoted . I've now become deeply obsessed with trying to understand how the mammalian brain works, partly out of curiosity about my own existence and partly out of a desire to make more robust, adaptable, flexible and user-friendly machines. I'm using digital computers for my research, because the computer is an excellent way to simulate new kinds of hardware that nobody yet knows how to build. But it's already clear to me that what's emerging doesn't look remotely like a computer and will need some radical technology. The key breakthrough has yet to be made (and maybe I'm not smart enough to make it) but out of the corner of my eye I keep catching glimpses of something very exciting. I feel like I'm chasing a butterfly, but every day I get a little closer. I just hope I get there before the money runs out. Qualifications and awardsNo academic qualifications; not even a rotten swimming certificate. However Cardiff University kindly gave me an honorary research fellowship in the School of Psychology, and Bath have followed suit with an hon. fellowship in Biomimetics at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, which I guess makes me into a psychological engineer, or something... On the last day of the last century, I was startled and extremely honoured to receive the OBE for my work on Creatures, thus drawing a neat line under the past eight years of my life. 1999 was a turbulent and upsetting year for me, but at least it ended well. Thanks, Your Majesty! Pictures of the investiture can be seen here - don't laugh! In November 2002 I was lucky enough to become a NESTA Dreamtime Fellow, so for a year Lucy is being funded by someone else! I'm extremely grateful to the really nice people at NESTA for having faith in me. Lots of people have said nice things about my work, for which I'm tremendously grateful (you can read some of them here - shameless boasting I admit). One especial highlight was when the Sunday Times listed me as one of the eighteen "brains behind the twentieth century", thus giving me something to live up to. I've also been privileged in recent years to make the acquaintance of some of my greatest intellectual heroes. What greater reward could anyone ask? Some time ago, Oxford TV made a documentary about my work and also that of the MIT Cog project and the StarBrain project at Starlab (now defunct). It was broadcast in the UK by Channel 4 on Oct 13th 2001 and, from what I remember of the filming, is almost entirely a catalogue of disasters. Other stuff |
Copyright © 2004 Cyberlife Research Ltd. |
Age: 46 and counting; married to Ann, with one son (Christopher)